In the context of public health taxation policies, the main hard-to-quantify downside would be freedom of choice. As you know, I’m sympathetic to the concern, and we worked together before on quantifying freedom lost from tobacco taxation while in the CE incubation programme (and I think it’s linked to somewhere in CEARCH’s evaluative framework, as an example of how one might do it).
Having explicitly run the numbers in the context of tobacco/​alcohol taxation + tightening road traffic standards in Singapore , my sense is that (a) for the range of realistic moral weights, very high taxes are still justified (i.e. the health benefits > the freedom of choice considerations), but outweigh bans are not (i.e. once you move from very high taxes to outright bans, the marginal health benefits decline below the value of freedom of choice).
Will definitely look to do this (i.e. incorporate freedom of choice considerations) at intermediate stages, and if we reach the deep stage I can definitely see the value of funding actual moral weights research on the matter (i.e. surveys to see how much people value being able to drink sweet drinks etc).
Cheers, Mathias.
In the context of public health taxation policies, the main hard-to-quantify downside would be freedom of choice. As you know, I’m sympathetic to the concern, and we worked together before on quantifying freedom lost from tobacco taxation while in the CE incubation programme (and I think it’s linked to somewhere in CEARCH’s evaluative framework, as an example of how one might do it).
Having explicitly run the numbers in the context of tobacco/​alcohol taxation + tightening road traffic standards in Singapore , my sense is that (a) for the range of realistic moral weights, very high taxes are still justified (i.e. the health benefits > the freedom of choice considerations), but outweigh bans are not (i.e. once you move from very high taxes to outright bans, the marginal health benefits decline below the value of freedom of choice).
Will definitely look to do this (i.e. incorporate freedom of choice considerations) at intermediate stages, and if we reach the deep stage I can definitely see the value of funding actual moral weights research on the matter (i.e. surveys to see how much people value being able to drink sweet drinks etc).